I'm truly curious as to why many of these "concept" electric vehicles always seem to poorly designed from an aerodynamic prespective. Surely some form of slope on the front would be beneficial rather than just making it look like a shoebox.

Last mile delivery vehicles don't need good aerodynamics as they don't travel fast - a shoebox is fine because it maximizes storage space.

Small point, but they might need to rethink that single windshield wiper shown in the picture. Drivers generally prefer a good view of the road rather than the sky - if might be better anchored at the bottom.

Last mile delivery vehicles don't need good aerodynamics as they don't travel fast - a shoebox is fine because it maximizes storage space.

Small point, but they might need to rethink that single windshield wiper shown in the picture. Drivers generally prefer a good view of the road rather than the sky - if might be better anchored at the bottom.

A part of the wiper is not visible in that picture. This is a picture from one of the trials of this not very stealthy startup:

I like hearing about “microfactories.” The lower number of parts in electric vehicles should make it easier for companies to make bespoke vehicles by combining a few off-the-shelf components with their custom parts. There’s a few regulatory hurdles to leap there, but assuming Arrival did it under the EU’s regime, it can be done.

I'm truly curious as to why many of these "concept" electric vehicles always seem to poorly designed from an aerodynamic prespective. Surely some form of slope on the front would be beneficial rather than just making it look like a shoebox.

Ever looked at the front of an urban bus? UPS or FedEx truck? Low speed, lots of stops and starts. Aero is pretty low on the priority list.

Not spelt out in the article, but relevant to micro-factories, is that although the investors are thinking in terms of the potential world market the demand is localised largely because of differing population densities. It is not just that large cities especially in Western Europe are imposing emission controls, but a large number of deliveries in a small area means smaller overall distance from depots, and shorter distances between stops. These are ideal conditions for use of electric vehicles.

For many years the UK had the highest use of electric delivery vehicles because home milk deliveries were made in this way before overtaken by supermarkets and convenience stores in different packaging and low prices.

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

Frequent stops/starts are not a problem for batteries, EV's actually have big advantages here. First they can use regenerative braking recover energy instead of turning it to heat in the brake pads. Secondly IC motors don't like to run a different loads (full throttle, idle, part throttle, etc - IC motors can't be optimized for this many conditions).

Overall the delivery van market is major opportunity for EV's - see Amazon investing in Rivian and stating they will but 100,000 EV vans. Look at UPS, Fedex, Amazon . . . .

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

BEVs are great with stops and starts due to regenerative braking, a flat efficiency curve, and no idle losses.

Yes weather will reduce range. Very high temps will reduce the range somewhat. Most BEV lose in ballpark 10% over 90F (32C). Very cold temps will reduce it more something like 30% under 30F (0C).

You wouldn't put a 200 mile BEV on a route which is exactly 200 miles. You would put it on a route which is say <120 miles which gives you some cushion for differences in driving, weather, and battery degredation over time.

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

BEVs are great with stops and starts due to regenerative braking, a flat efficiency curve, and no idle losses.

Yes weather will reduce range. Very high temps will reduce the range somewhat. Most BEV lose in ballpark 10% over 90F (32C) and up to 30% under 30F (0C).

You wouldn't put a 200 mile BEV on a route which is exactly 200 miles. You would put it on a route which is say <120 miles which gives you some cushion for differences in driving, weather, and battery degredation over time.

Also, in large parts of northern Europe, temperatures over 32 and below zero only affect a few days a year.

Last mile delivery vehicles don't need good aerodynamics as they don't travel fast - a shoebox is fine because it maximizes storage space.

Small point, but they might need to rethink that single windshield wiper shown in the picture. Drivers generally prefer a good view of the road rather than the sky - if might be better anchored at the bottom.

A part of the wiper is not visible in that picture. This is a picture from one of the trials of this not very stealthy startup:

One big advantage of the big square window at the front of a van approach is that a suspended wiper can give good coverage - and is mechanically better than the ones that move upward.

I'm truly curious as to why many of these "concept" electric vehicles always seem to poorly designed from an aerodynamic prespective. Surely some form of slope on the front would be beneficial rather than just making it look like a shoebox.

Snarky answer: hop on a bike during a mild day and see how fast you have to go to notice wind resistance as a major drag (forgive the pun). Above 15 and it's very noticeable, but below 10 it's negligible.

Real answer since you're truly curious and have a philosophy-themed name: fuel/energy efficiency is one part of the cost equation, and a fairly minor one at that. Worse, aero-derived improvements in fuel efficiency directly decrease revenue per vehicle (due to less storage space), or, for a given fleet capacity, increase other costs (due to the need for additional vehicles & drivers).

If you look at the total cost of operation (driver, vehicle depreciation & maintenance, fuel), fuel is a relatively small component of that. Hypothetical case using conventional fuel: 50,000 miles/year (150 miles * 350 days/year), which seems high/conservative. At 20mpg, you're consuming 2500 gallons of fuel ... or $7500. Compare this to the driver @ $50K (2000 hours * $25/hour ... higher when you factor in benefits and taxes), the vehicle at ~$15K (assume $45K acquisition cost and 150K mile lifespan).

Now consider that cost-per-mile for electric will be cheaper than conventional fuels), and if you take 10% out of capacity to get "aero", even if you double your fuel economy, for every 100 vehicles in your fleet you'll need to add 11 to get the same capacity. Those fuel economy savings in the example above are $3750, but the marginal extra costs from the additional truck/driver are 11%*$(50K+15K+$3.75K) ... or ~$7.5K. Ergo, you've saved 50% on fuel costs (highly unlikely!) but ended up spending twice the fuel cost savings on additional vehicles and personnel.

Note as fuel costs decrease, the value proposition of "aero" gets lower and lower (mentioned because electric efficiency is significantly higher than ICEs). Layer in the extra vehicular lifespan of electric over gas/diesel, lower maintenance costs, generally lower fuel costs, and transitioning to an electric fleet is a no-brainer for the last-10-miles logistics industry.

I'm truly curious as to why many of these "concept" electric vehicles always seem to poorly designed from an aerodynamic prespective. Surely some form of slope on the front would be beneficial rather than just making it look like a shoebox.

Snarky answer: hop on a bike during a mild day and see how fast you have to go to notice wind resistance as a major drag (forgive the pun). Above 15 and it's very noticeable, but below 10 it's negligible.

Real answer since you're truly curious and have a philosophy-themed name: fuel/energy efficiency is one part of the cost equation, and a fairly minor one at that. Worse, aero-derived improvements in fuel efficiency directly decrease revenue per vehicle (due to less storage space), or, for a given fleet capacity, increase other costs (due to the need for additional vehicles & drivers).

If you look at the total cost of operation (driver, vehicle depreciation & maintenance, fuel), fuel is a relatively small component of that. Hypothetical case using conventional fuel: 50,000 miles/year (150 miles * 350 days/year), which seems high/conservative. At 20mpg, you're consuming 2500 gallons of fuel ... or $7500. Compare this to the driver @ $50K (2000 hours * $25/hour ... higher when you factor in benefits and taxes), the vehicle at ~$15K (assume $45K acquisition cost and 150K mile lifespan).

Now consider that cost-per-mile for electric will be cheaper than conventional fuels), and if you take 10% out of capacity to get "aero", even if you double your fuel economy, for every 100 vehicles in your fleet you'll need to add 11 to get the same capacity. Those fuel economy savings in the example above are $3750, but the marginal extra costs from the additional truck/driver are 11%*$(50K+15K+$3.75K) ... or ~$7.5K. Ergo, you've saved 50% on fuel costs (highly unlikely!) but ended up spending twice the fuel cost savings on additional vehicles and personnel.

Note as fuel costs decrease, the value proposition of "aero" gets lower and lower (mentioned because electric efficiency is significantly higher than ICEs). Layer in the extra vehicular lifespan of electric over gas/diesel, lower maintenance costs, generally lower fuel costs, and transitioning to an electric fleet is a no-brainer for the last-10-miles logistics industry.

You're using $3/gallon for fuel price, when in the UK and the rest of Europe it approaches three times that. Also, 20 mpg for an urban/suburban delivery van with up to 2 tons cargo capacity seems optimistic. Factor those in and the fuel savings become much more important. Maintenance, and the associated downtime, should also favor the electric vehicle.

The first benefit of an EV seems not to be fuel economy (a byproduct!) or maintenance cost, but its lifespan!

Still, the main cost is the driver (and associated costs).

Delivering without driver on the last 10-mile or the last-mile, at least for B2B, will be a competitive breakthrough, this is where the money really is.And with the expected very long lifespan of EV, it make sense to buy vehicles costing 2X or 3X the price!

Unless you've been the U.K. you have no idea the role small delivery vans make in the economy. Once you get out of major city centers, the roads become small and sometimes windy through the various villages and hamlets. Large vehicles are a liability and would bring things down to a crawl, in addition to drawing the ire of those around you. Getting a hundred thousand vans off of carbon fuels would make a huge dent in pollution levels. Additionally, have you seen the cost of fuel there? About three times US level. The savings would be astronomical for operators.

I know this is unrelated, but could you fix the RSS feed? On Feedly, when I click on the title of an article from Wired that has been republished on Ars, I get redirected to Wired.com, but I naturally want to read it on Ars.

If van manufacturers can get it right, and also offer vans in the Ford Transit and Volkswagen Transporter range, at prices under say €35,000.- the transition to electric in this segment makes so much sense, that things may shift considerably quicker than the passenger vehicle market. I would buy one.

As a side note, I can't wait for the smoke belching 300.000 km diesel delivery vans to disappear.

Unless you've been the U.K. you have no idea the role small delivery vans make in the economy. Once you get out of major city centers, the roads become small and sometimes windy through the various villages and hamlets. Large vehicles are a liability and would bring things down to a crawl, in addition to drawing the ire of those around you. Getting a hundred thousand vans off of carbon fuels would make a huge dent in pollution levels. Additionally, have you seen the cost of fuel there? About three times US level. The savings would be astronomical for operators.

Yes, in the UK even rural areas can be fairly close to a distribution depot. And narrow roads are not just a feature of rural areas (my own street, of 25 houses, is very urban and about 10 ft wide wall-to-wall though that is an extreme). Most deliveries will be made where densities are highest, so a delivery round may consist of many stops within just a few kilometres even though the depot could be some distance away. In that sense, 'last mile' is something of a misnomer.

I have just been calculating whether my Amazon delivery today could have been made in one of these. Theoretically yes, though the round trip from me to the depot is close to 150 km, because the actual round was almost certainly less than 20 km.

I like hearing about “microfactories.” The lower number of parts in electric vehicles should make it easier for companies to make bespoke vehicles by combining a few off-the-shelf components with their custom parts. There’s a few regulatory hurdles to leap there, but assuming Arrival did it under the EU’s regime, it can be done.

It is the peculiarities of our small island that made these early BEVs viable.

Their anaemic range and speed was not an issue for their intended purpose, although the frequent butt of jokes. This may be why a certain ancient Briton was mean about a certain South African's attempt to make a BEV car.

Whilst the electric Milk Float has almost totally disappeared (in both sight and sound) from our roads, I am glad to see the fundamentally sensible idea of using BEV delivery vehicles lives on.

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

BEVs are great with stops and starts due to regenerative braking, a flat efficiency curve, and no idle losses.

Yes weather will reduce range. Very high temps will reduce the range somewhat. Most BEV lose in ballpark 10% over 90F (32C). Very cold temps will reduce it more something like 30% under 30F (0C).

You wouldn't put a 200 mile BEV on a route which is exactly 200 miles. You would put it on a route which is say <120 miles which gives you some cushion for differences in driving, weather, and battery degredation over time.

While I've never worked for UPS or Fedex, I have worked for USPS and even they don't have local routes over 120 miles in most places... And rural USPS routes tend to be long in comparison. As an example the two main rural routes I covered were 75 and 83 miles with ~500 houses/boxes on each. City routes are typically much shorter.

However, looking at these things I doubt even UPS or Fedex would use them in my area because we have to many dirt roads (to expensive to pay for more than a handful of rural roads to be paved). We also get a lot of snow here and the roads are rarely clear. That doesn't look like it could handle either situation well with small tires and narrow looking wheel wells.

Interesting idea, and if they can do the micro factories, they could be. in a very good position to license out to many countries including third world ones with congested cities. Although it is sensible to be prepared for a self-driving world, letting others risk their money there is a good idea. After all, if nobody has a job anymore, few of them will be ordering stuff for the delivery vehicles to deliver. And the Kochs can always send the butler out to pick stuff up if needed.

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

BEVs are great with stops and starts due to regenerative braking, a flat efficiency curve, and no idle losses.

Yes weather will reduce range. Very high temps will reduce the range somewhat. Most BEV lose in ballpark 10% over 90F (32C). Very cold temps will reduce it more something like 30% under 30F (0C).

You wouldn't put a 200 mile BEV on a route which is exactly 200 miles. You would put it on a route which is say <120 miles which gives you some cushion for differences in driving, weather, and battery degredation over time.

While I've never worked for UPS or Fedex, I have worked for USPS and even they don't have local routes over 120 miles in most places... And rural USPS routes tend to be long in comparison. As an example the two main rural routes I covered were 75 and 83 miles with ~500 houses/boxes on each. City routes are typically much shorter.

However, looking at these things I doubt even UPS or Fedex would use them in my area because we have to many dirt roads (to expensive to pay for more than a handful of rural roads to be paved). We also get a lot of snow here and the roads are rarely clear. That doesn't look like it could handle either situation well with small tires and narrow looking wheel wells.

With micro factories and the right fabrication techniques, one could quite easily build custom variants to suit the local client. Maybe Arrival can go the route of ARM.

It shows, not surprisingly, their R&D center is in the southern part of the British Midlands, even though their "HQ" is in London. Weird not to co-locate everything as that creates unnecessary organizational inefficiencies.

Their senior management team looks like a GM refugee center and they were founded by a Russian.

How does traffic and weather factor into this? I would assume many starts and stops would reduce battery life. Heating and cooling would also cut into it.

BEVs are great with stops and starts due to regenerative braking, a flat efficiency curve, and no idle losses.

Yes weather will reduce range. Very high temps will reduce the range somewhat. Most BEV lose in ballpark 10% over 90F (32C). Very cold temps will reduce it more something like 30% under 30F (0C).

You wouldn't put a 200 mile BEV on a route which is exactly 200 miles. You would put it on a route which is say <120 miles which gives you some cushion for differences in driving, weather, and battery degredation over time.

While I've never worked for UPS or Fedex, I have worked for USPS and even they don't have local routes over 120 miles in most places... And rural USPS routes tend to be long in comparison. As an example the two main rural routes I covered were 75 and 83 miles with ~500 houses/boxes on each. City routes are typically much shorter.

However, looking at these things I doubt even UPS or Fedex would use them in my area because we have to many dirt roads (to expensive to pay for more than a handful of rural roads to be paved). We also get a lot of snow here and the roads are rarely clear. That doesn't look like it could handle either situation well with small tires and narrow looking wheel wells.

Those issues usually aren't an issue on European roads.

Range is an issue, because the worse part of the delivery season is late December, and while it doesn't get as cold as (say) Chicago, you'll definitely see range shorten exactly when the vehicles are used for longer hours. Plus, you should never plan on using more than 70% of the range anyway. So to get 85 miles of usable range in late December would probably mean a range rating of twice that.

With micro factories and the right fabrication techniques, one could quite easily build custom variants to suit the local client. Maybe Arrival can go the route of ARM.

ARM, if anything, is a great counter example of micro-factories.

ARM does not have fabrication facilities at all. It licenses IP (e.g. design blocks) to chip suppliers which integrate them into actual chip designs.But most of those chip designers don't have fabrication facilities either. They outsource to the actual fabrication to foundries.

And the foundries are just about the most concentrated business I can think of.In the entire world there are only 3 companies (TSMC, intel and Samsung) with facilities for fabricating state of the art chips, concentrated in a handful of locations .Furthermore designs are not trivially moved from one company to another, it requires considerable re-design effort.

More relevant to the point: Vans, like regular cars, are a low margin market segment.If you want to succeed you squeeze to cut costs at every point.The traditional huge factories are actually large very expensive machines designed to optimize away every possible cent out of the process of transforming metal and per-assembled parts into vehicles and even the smallest lines produce hundreds of vehicles per day.At 10'000 vehicles per year or about 30 a day, these micro-factories sound like artisanal assembly halls with high per vehicle costs.

Not spelt out in the article, but relevant to micro-factories, is that although the investors are thinking in terms of the potential world market the demand is localised largely because of differing population densities. It is not just that large cities especially in Western Europe are imposing emission controls, but a large number of deliveries in a small area means smaller overall distance from depots, and shorter distances between stops. These are ideal conditions for use of electric vehicles.

For many years the UK had the highest use of electric delivery vehicles because home milk deliveries were made in this way before overtaken by supermarkets and convenience stores in different packaging and low prices.

Honestly, I see EV's shining in this region far more than I do as POV's. Last mile delivery is where having an EV truly makes sense.

Given that hybrid/PHEV sales still outstrip EV sales 2:1 (as of 2018), I tend to think that the outlier issues of having an EV as a POV matter to folks more than one might otherwise think. For folks who don't do road trips, and own homes or have convenient charging stations at their disposal, that's fine. For those who do road trips and don't have a convenient charging station (or don't have the time/inclination to deal with recharging), they're not so fine. But that's for personal use and it's still in flux.

Businesses, though, have all the up-sides of using EV's with none of the down-sides. They don't do road trips. They'll have dedicated, convenient recharging stations. The use of EV's in a neighborhood is QUIET. The pollution levels will go way down, too.

So, yes, I agree that this is absolutely the best application of EV use because unlike the current state of personal ownership of an EV (especially for those who don't have access to charging stations at home), there are no down-sides at all for a business to use them.

The way to drive adoption is to make the transition as smooth as possible, with as few down-sides as possible. Businesses involved in delivery are ideal for EV's, and will save them money as well. Once these trucks are available and businesses have written off the costs of their current fleets, I expect to see much faster adoption among businesses than among the general population.

It shows, not surprisingly, their R&D center is in the southern part of the British Midlands, even though their "HQ" is in London. Weird not to co-locate everything as that creates unnecessary organizational inefficiencies.

Their senior management team looks like a GM refugee center and they were founded by a Russian.

As someone that currently works in a ~13k square foot unit I can safely say that it's really not a lot of space. Most likely/realistic to my mind is them having a large primary factory that produces at the very least the skateboard for the vans, which are then shipped to the relevant microfactory as needed to be mated with the body to suit customer orders. Doing the battery pack assembly locally seems like it would be an insane idea, but shipping the battery as part of an assembled primary chassis that includes the motor(s) and most of the wiring harness would still give you a fairly compact slab that would be very efficient to ship compared to finished vans, and bolting on the wheels and upper body (either manufactured locally or shipped as kits from another/the same central factory) and finishing out the interior would seem to be perfectly doable in such a small area.

Not spelt out in the article, but relevant to micro-factories, is that although the investors are thinking in terms of the potential world market the demand is localised largely because of differing population densities. It is not just that large cities especially in Western Europe are imposing emission controls, but a large number of deliveries in a small area means smaller overall distance from depots, and shorter distances between stops. These are ideal conditions for use of electric vehicles.

For many years the UK had the highest use of electric delivery vehicles because home milk deliveries were made in this way before overtaken by supermarkets and convenience stores in different packaging and low prices.

Honestly, I see EV's shining in this region far more than I do as POV's. Last mile delivery is where having an EV truly makes sense.

Given that hybrid/PHEV sales still outstrip EV sales 2:1 (as of 2018), I tend to think that the outlier issues of having an EV as a POV matter to folks more than one might otherwise think. For folks who don't do road trips, and own homes or have convenient charging stations at their disposal, that's fine. For those who do road trips and don't have a convenient charging station (or don't have the time/inclination to deal with recharging), they're not so fine. But that's for personal use and it's still in flux.

Businesses, though, have all the up-sides of using EV's with none of the down-sides. They don't do road trips. They'll have dedicated, convenient recharging stations. The use of EV's in a neighborhood is QUIET. The pollution levels will go way down, too.

So, yes, I agree that this is absolutely the best application of EV use because unlike the current state of personal ownership of an EV (especially for those who don't have access to charging stations at home), there are no down-sides at all for a business to use them.

The way to drive adoption is to make the transition as smooth as possible, with as few down-sides as possible. Businesses involved in delivery are ideal for EV's, and will save them money as well. Once these trucks are available and businesses have written off the costs of their current fleets, I expect to see much faster adoption among businesses than among the general population.

There are two issues though.First for businesses EVs have to make financial sense.For individuals not so much. If all individuals cared in a car was economics, we'd all be driving small cheap fuel efficient cars.Instead a lot of us buy cars which are more expensive to buy and operate because... well, we're not machines.Thus there's an actual market prepared to pay a premium for an EV.And in fact it's in premium vehicles EVs have been more successful.

Second we drive relatively little per day but at the same time we are willing to pay more to have several fold more range.This plays very well with the issues of battery size and cost. It also plays well with the battery lifetime: cycling only 10-20% of the battery per day it's pretty much certain the battery will last as much as the rest of the vehicle.

For commercial vehicles we're still at a point where cost and size of a battery barely big enough for a single day of driving is a problem. And where there is some uncertainty about the lifetime of the battery being cycled ~100% per day.

I'm truly curious as to why many of these "concept" electric vehicles always seem to poorly designed from an aerodynamic prespective. Surely some form of slope on the front would be beneficial rather than just making it look like a shoebox.

Actually, you'd likely be surprised at how aerodynamic that 'flat' front can be. That little bit of curve on the edges will help air flow around the corners, and that transition is a larger problem than the actual front face. Yes it's not as aerodynamic as a Tesla or a Prius, but it's likely better than you'd guess.

(And as mentioned above: For the intended use, aerodynamics aren't as important as they would be in many other cases.)

The way to drive adoption is to make the transition as smooth as possible, with as few down-sides as possible. Businesses involved in delivery are ideal for EV's, and will save them money as well. Once these trucks are available and businesses have written off the costs of their current fleets, I expect to see much faster adoption among businesses than among the general population.

One reason of that could be that they will drive up the price of battery, making it less reachable for non-business use. Another is that urban population will find better ways of intra-city transport, like electric scooters and rollers.

I know this is unrelated, but could you fix the RSS feed? On Feedly, when I click on the title of an article from Wired that has been republished on Ars, I get redirected to Wired.com, but I naturally want to read it on Ars.

It’s not every RSS reader, clicking on the title in Inoreader takes me to Ars.